SOURCE: "The Offstage Mob: Shakespeare's Proletariat," in Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Tokyo, 1991, edited by Tetsuo Kishi, Roger Pringle and Stanley Wells, University of Delaware Press, 1994, pp. 54-75.

In the following essay, Greer considers representations of social class in the audiences, players, and characters of Shakespearean drama.

Dr. Gary Taylor, in an important book that was given too short shrift by those of his colleagues who deigned to notice it, tells us that "Like women, the lower and middle classes are systematically underrepresented by Shakespeare. They are also . . . misrepresented. They are all, like Shakespeare's prostitutes, seen from above."¹ This observation is the more important because every schoolchild has noticed that Shakespeare does not write about ordinary people. Shakespeare's plots all involve the doings of the ruling class, of kings and barons, of princesses and dukes' daughters. Shepherdesses can only...